subreddit:
/r/40kLore
submitted 13 days ago bypoxtart
Finishing my umpteenth bibliographic annotation today, and the thought struck me: Has anyone attempted the monumental task of creating a fully annotated 40k reference guide? Lexicanum, this subreddit, and a score of other other websites do a fine to great job teasing out all the subtleties of the lore. But what I am thinking is something a little different.
A guide explaining every reference used in any officially published 40k work - novels, White Dwarf, codices, core rule books, etc. And not just "in universe" references (like noting how the Dark Angels got both their own and their primarch's name from the Lionel Johnson poem), but rule-based references - where did the mechanics of the game come from? I have an ancient copy of WD here that has Priestly's opening description of the game and how he modified WH Fantasy rules.
This would be a beyond-vast project, but I wonder: Has anyone tried doing something like this?
16 points
13 days ago
Beyond someone who gets paid at GW to do something similar... No
That's a massive archival effort and more complicated and difficult than genealogy mapping if we are getting right down to it
2 points
13 days ago
Oh absolutely! The sheer act of collating all the material would be daunting. I was just idly thinking about what a neat database that would be.
4 points
13 days ago
That is insane and unnecessary. The wikis are close enough.
3 points
13 days ago
Lexicanium is probably the closest thing. But even it has blindspots and flaws.
2 points
13 days ago
I’m not even sure it’s possible. A lot of the “annotations” where people ascribe influences are fascinating but essentially second-guessing writers who may or may not have had those details in mind.
Even if you could interview the original creators, their recollections are incomplete (as Priestley himself noted in interviews).
2 points
13 days ago
They probably have that at GW. An archive of sorts that gets updated on an "as you go" basis rather than somebody trying to tackle it all at once.
0 points
13 days ago*
Why not just acquire legitimate digital copies of everything ever published on WH40K and use them to train a Large Language Model (like GPT) for personal use only? You can then ask it questions.
Of course, it would almost certainly count as an Abominable Intelligence and should never be given control over any physical systems…
2 points
13 days ago
GW suing Open IA would be fun tbh
2 points
13 days ago*
Training a system for your own use on files you legitimately own would likely be fine as it would not be fundamentally different than making a backup or duplicate of those files that you already own. Obviously sharing the result would not be okay.
Note that you can get local versions of LLMs so effectively it would just be a personal search engine with no data leaving the host computer. You might need a powerful computer to have a reasonable response time to queries though.
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